Nuclear Weapons

U.S. Goes for 'Space Force All the Way'

NEW YORK (IDN-INPS) – […] Vice-President Mike Pence announced the Trump administration’s plan for a new military command, the U.S. Space Force, emphasizing President Donald Trump’s urging that “It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space: we must have American dominance in space.” Pence’s announcement was greeted by Trump, tweeting in response, “Space Force all the way!”

Pence’s rationale for this disturbing expansion of U.S. militarization to the heavens is that “our adversaries”, Russia and China, “have been working to bring new weapons of war into space itself” that pose a threat to American satellites.

But despite a virtual blackout in the mainstream media, Russia and China have been arguing for years in the halls of the United Nations that the world needs a treaty to prevent stationing such weapons in outer space in order to maintain global “strategic stability” among the major powers and enable nuclear disarmament.

We reach this point after a sad history of missed opportunities for peace in space and nuclear disarmament. It began with President Truman’s rejection of Stalin’s proposal to place the bomb under international control at the United Nations in 1946.

Then President Reagan rejected former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s offer to eliminate nuclear weapons, provided the U.S. didn’t proceed with his plan for Star Wars, a space-based military system, later described in 1997 under the Clinton administration, as the U.S. Space Command’s Vision 2020, proclaiming its mission to “dominate and control the military use of space to protect U.S. interests and investments.”